This is Dave Edstrom's personal blog called Photons and Electrons. This blog is about technology, as well as some of my personal interests. I am the CEO/CTO of Virtual Photons Electrons. I was the CTO for MEMEX for three years, the President and Chairman of the Board for the MTConnect Institute from May 2010 to January 2014 and prior to that I spent 23 years at Sun Microsystems.

"3D printing, a technology that has been in use for several decades,
is part of a broader movement known as direct digital manufacturing
(DDM) that could forever change the way we make things.

We're not quite at the stage envisioned by Star Trek: The Next Generation
where a replicator on board the star ship can create any kind of
inanimate matter, including food (but not, of course, antimatter,
dilithium or latinum). But we're getting closer."

I don't care what industry you come from or background you have, 3D printing is just flat out super cool. For example, check the world's first 3D printed car - the Urbee automobile:

"For example, consider the Urbee automobile which was featured in a recent Digital Manufacturing Report posting.
This cute little car, a two-seater, hybrid electric/ethanol vehicle
capable of 200 mpg on the highway, is the first automobile to have its
entire body printed using Statasys FDM technology and a tough plastic
known as ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene). Traditional
manufacturing methods, which involve making molds and shaping the parts
out of fiberglass, would have been a laborious and expensive process
stretching out over eight to 10 months. With FDM, several major body
panels for the first prototype were built in weeks. Other parts were
produced in days."

"For each of them, he applies his five-second rule: he puts a slide on
a screen, removes it after five seconds, and then asks the viewer to
describe the slide. A dense slide fails the test—and fails to provide
the basic function of any visual: to aid the presentation.

By applying his simple rule, Mr. Khosla is addressing two of the most
important elements in presentation graphics: Less is More, a plea all
too often sounded by helpless audiences to hapless presenters; and more
important, the human perception factor. Whenever an image appears on any
screen, the eyes of every member of every audience reflexively move to
the screen to process the new image. The denser the image, the more
processing the audiences need. At that very moment, they stop listening
to the presenter. Nevertheless, most presenters continue speaking,
further compounding the processing task. As a result, the audience shuts
down. Game over."

About Dave Edstrom

This is Dave Edstrom's personal blog called Photons and Electrons. This is the same name of the blog I had for Sun Microsystems for many years. I am the CEO/CTO for Virtual Photons Electrons, LLC. More info is available at http://VirtualPhotonsElectrons.com I was the CTO for MEMEX for almost three years. More information on MEMEX is at http://MemexOEE.com